


Me and My Magic Man

by mira (stellamira)



Category: Actor RPF, Supernatural RPF
Genre: Anal Sex, Cats, M/M, Spells & Enchantments, Truth Spells, Wizards
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-29
Updated: 2019-12-29
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:35:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22012687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stellamira/pseuds/mira
Summary: When down-on-his-luck wizard Jared gets thrown out of the guild - and the guild house - Jensen helps him out. What else are friends with benefits for?
Relationships: Jensen Ackles/Jared Padalecki
Comments: 4
Kudos: 104
Collections: 2019 Supernatural & CWRPF Holiday Exchange





	Me and My Magic Man

**Author's Note:**

  * For [whisperedstory](https://archiveofourown.org/users/whisperedstory/gifts).



> Written for spn_j2_xmas.
> 
> Title borrowed from Uriah Heep's "The Wizard".

Jared’s left knee was jiggling. He couldn’t help it. It was a nervous habit, just like wringing his sweaty hands in his lap and pushing his hair from his forehead back behind his ears just for it to fall forward again a second later. Come to think of it, maybe those tics played a big part in why he was here now in the first place.

A slender hand slid onto his thigh and pressed lightly down. “Stop it,” Genevieve said. “It’s going to be fine.”

Jared bit his lip. “I don’t know. I think I really screwed up this time. I might have used half an ounce of aconite and a full ounce of arnica instead of the other way around. And maybe I stirred it half a turn too much, or—“

“Jared,” Genevieve said gently. “It’s all right. Whichever mistake you made, they caught it, nobody got hurt. You learn from it, and you move on. It will be _fine_.”

Jared loved her dearly, and he was glad to have her with him, waiting on an uncomfortable stone bench outside of the court room. But she couldn’t really calm down the myriad of thoughts flitting through his head – what if they took away his license? What if they wiped his memory, set his brain back to when he’d just started college fourteen years ago and made him go through all the clusterfuck of finding himself and where he wanted to stand in the world all over again? What if they threw him out of the guild?

“Oh goddess,” he moaned and buried his head in his hands. “They’re going to throw me out.”

“They are _not_ going to throw you out,” Genevieve said firmly, just as the door beside them opened and one of the elders asked Jared inside.

***

A leather briefcase appeared in Jared’s field of vision first, then a torso clad in a long-sleeved grey shirt as someone sat down on the chair opposite and set their own coffee cup down on the table. The coffee shop was small and packed, and more than once someone had come by and even opened their mouth to ask if this seat was taken. But then they had taken one look at Jared’s face and hurriedly moved on. With an effort, Jared raised his eyes now to find a long neck, some three-day stubble, and piercing green eyes.

“Hey,” Jensen said carefully.

Jared just stared at him gloomily, swirling his right index finger to keep the spoon stirring in his coffee cup.

“Genevieve called me,” Jensen went on. Of course she had. “She said they—“

“They threw me out!” Jared lamented, folding his arms on the table and thunking his head between them. The spoon clattered against the side of the cup as it stopped its movement.

“But you can still do magic, right?” Jensen argued. “They can’t just take that from you.”

“Yes,” Jared said, a little muffled through his still folded arms. “But if I’m not a member of the guild, nobody’s going to want to employ me for even as much as _this_.” He raised one hand and snapped his fingers, and felt the zing as a tiny flare of fireworks popped into existence.

“It’s going to be fine.” Yeah, you could not tell that Jensen and Genevieve were friends, too, at all. Jared finally lifted his head again to glare at him. “Look, I—“ Jensen paused to pick up Jared’s mug and sniffed at it. “What are you drinking, anyway?”

“Irish coffee,” Jared said and rummaged around in his pocket to come up with a silver flask. “I brought my own Irish. You want some?”

“No, thanks,” Jensen said, taking a sip of his own coffee. “Someone will have to drag your drunk ass home.”

 _Home_. Jared suddenly felt sick. He’d been too busy dealing with being basically unemployed now to think much about the other problem he had.

“Shit.” Jensen must have interpreted his reaction correctly. “They threw you out of your room at the guild house, too?”

Jared shrugged helplessly. They had graciously given him two weeks to move out, but in this city, that really wasn’t much time to find another place, especially a cheap one.

“Hey,” Jensen reached out and encircled Jared’s wrist with his fingers. “We’ll figure something out.”

***

Jared woke up from a soft, cool touch on his nose. He opened his eyes slowly, not used to the sun tickling his face in the morning – his own room at the guild house was facing west. Then he nearly had a heart attack at the sight of the cat sitting on the bed beside him. Heart pounding, he lay still as the cat reached out a curious paw – claws thankfully retracted – and landed on his cheek this time. It pawed at his face a couple of times, then drew back and contorted itself into half a pretzel to lick its fur. Carefully, Jared sat up.

He was in Jensen’s bedroom, naturally, but Jensen didn’t have a cat. Or at least he hadn’t had one the last time Jared had stayed over, about three days ago. The cat was not what you’d call a beauty, its matted fur had an indefinable sandy and white pattern, and its proportions were just slightly off. The only thing that really stood out were its remarkable green eyes.

“Where did you come from?” Jared wondered aloud and the cat paused its cleaning to look at him as if it thought he was an idiot. His gaze fell to the open window behind the cat. “Of course,” he muttered.

Getting up, he stumbled into the bathroom and took care of his morning routine, skipping the shower for now. He had a slight headache, but that was quickly cured by massaging his temples so the pain would transfer to his fingertips and then flicking it away. The cat was still sitting on the bed as he passed through the bedroom again on his shuffling to the kitchen, but it jumped down silently and ran after him, twisting between his legs as he opened the cupboard containing the filters and coffee grounds.

He didn’t know if Jensen was fine with the cat being in his apartment, but Jared liked them. It came with being a wizard, really – a lot of guild members had one for a familiar. Besides, Jensen had no cat food or a litter box – it would leave on its own eventually.

While the coffee was brewing, he tried to recall the previous night. He’d had a couple more Irish coffees than he’d thought, and he distinctly remembered hanging onto Jensen’s back and rubbing against him as Jensen had tried to open his door, then pressing him up against the wall for some sloppy kisses as soon as they’d made it inside. Jensen had pushed him away, laughing, claiming that Jared couldn’t get it up anyway with the amount of alcohol he’d consumed. Jared had tried to prove him wrong by, _ugh_ , using magic to pump some blood into his dick and create an impressive tent in his jeans. He’d _never_ had to resort to magical help for sex, thank you very much. But Jensen had just tucked him into bed, and even though Jared was sure Jensen must have joined him a few minutes later, he’d already been deep asleep by then.

The cat growled softly, demanding his attention, and he reached down with one hand to let it rub against his palm.

“You’re right,” he told it. “Not my finest moment.”

***

Jared didn’t really have anything to do – or anywhere to go – so he stayed until Jensen came back from work. As predicted, the cat hat long since wandered off, probably in search of its own home and the prospect of food, and Jared had summoned the hair it had shed everywhere in the apartment into a neat pile on the floor that he had swept up and thrown away. He’d made himself useful, too, by preparing a couple of sandwiches and whipping up a salad. And had only ended up with a small bandage when the knife he’d set to cutting the bread had come flying at him once it was done.

Jensen devoured his first sandwich almost in the doorway to the kitchen as if he hadn’t had anything to eat all day, then blushed slightly and actually sat down at the table to start the second one.

“How were the kids?” Jared asked, dishing out some salad.

“Little demons as usual,” Jensen said, but there was that fond look on his face that he always had when he talked about them. Jensen loved teaching. “Listen.” Jensen set his sandwich down. “I was thinking. I know Genevieve will offer you to stay with her if you need to, but her apartment’s a shoebox.” He meant it literally, too – Genevieve’s tiny, tiny apartment was half stuffed with shoes. “And I know this isn’t something we—we said this wouldn’t be a part of our arrangement. But you could move in here. Not into my bedroom,” he hastened to add. “But we could clear out the spare room again and put in a bed and some stuff. Just until you find a job and a place of your own, to buy you some time.”

Jared contemplated it over a forkful of salad. Well, actually he knew the answer as soon as he put the fork in his mouth, but then he had to chew and swallow – because word of his awful table manners _would_ get back to his momma _somehow_ – before answering. “Yes,” he said as soon as he could. “That would be great, actually. Thanks.”

For a second Jensen looked almost surprised that Jared had agreed so quickly, then a smile spread over his face. “Good! We can—um, what are you doing?”

Jared had put his fork aside and gotten up, making his way around the table. With a flick of his wrist, he urged Jensen’s chair around so he could sink more or less gracefully to his knees between Jensen’s legs, pushing them further apart. He looked up through his lashes. “I thought I should thank you properly,” he said as he undid the button of Jensen’s jeans and drew down the zipper.

“Now that you mention it,” Jensen breathed, tilting his hips so Jared had better access to his underwear, “I think you should.” Jared drew him out and bent forward at the same time, closing his eyes as the tip of Jensen’s cock met his lips. He licked a circle around the crown, and Jensen groaned above him. “Oh yeah. You definitely should.”

***

The spare room had been Jensen’s roommate Danneel’s room, until she had moved out and in with her boyfriend about eight months ago, and Jensen had found some mysterious second source of income that allowed him to pay the rent by himself. It was around that time that he and Jared had started their thing, and Jared was rather glad there was no danger of someone stumbling over them if they happened to feel like screwing in the kitchen. Or over the couch. Or against the wall in the short hallway.

Jensen hadn’t accumulated much in the room since then, so cleaning it out hadn’t taken much time. Some things had moved back into Jensen’s bedroom, some into boxes, and some had stayed, like the big wooden desk that Jensen liked to sit at to grade his papers. It came in handy now as Jared spread out today’s local paper and his laptop to hunt for a job.

The cat was back, having wriggled through the open slit in his window earlier, and was currently sitting on Jared’s lap, front paws on the desk in front of it, seemingly watching the screen as intently as Jared was.

There were a couple of openings for a wizard, but they all required a membership in the guild, even the ones for kids’ birthday parties. Jared scrolled past. The city had some positions for administrative work, but he would need a degree for that. Mechanics, teachers, nurses, helicopter pilots. Sighing, Jared propped his elbow on the desk and set his chin in his palm.

The cat reached out a paw and fumbled at the keyboard, accidentally landing on the down arrow key. Jared started as the screen contents flitted past.

“Whoops.” He gently lifted the cat’s paw away and tucked the cat closer to his chest. Then he made to close the browser, but paused when he saw what the scrolling had stopped at: a newly-opened diner downtown was looking for a fry cook. Not the most glamorous job, but a start, and something he could easily do. Had in fact done before, in his first college year.

“Hey,” he said and scratched the cat underneath its chin. “You’re good.”

The cat purred in contentment.

***

The bedsprings were groaning.

A lonely bead of sweat made its way from Jensen’s hairline down his temple.

Jared’s fingers clenched in the sheets.

Jensen’s powerful thrusts were the source of the bedsprings. He’d set up a fierce rhythm almost as soon as he’d slid fully inside, and Jared loved it. One of his legs was thrown over Jensen’s shoulder and one wrapped tight around his waist, opening him up so they could join together, over and over in their intimate embrace.

It took an effort to unknot his fingers, but he did it to wrap his hand around the back of Jensen’s neck and pull him down, finally lick that offending bead of sweat off before sharing the salty taste in a kiss. His own thigh was pressed even harder into his stomach in this position, and Jensen sank impossibly deeper inside, hitting all the right spots with unerring precision. Jared’s cock was trapped between them, seeking out the friction of their stomachs, pleasure rising, and there—Jensen was grunting in his ear, chasing his own release to—Jared raised his hips, clenched around him, felt him pulse as he started coming, and—

His orgasm hit him like a wave at the beach, mounting to crash over him and sweep him under, dragging him with it until it receded and left him boneless on the bed to flop down and spread out in utter satisfaction.

Jensen pulled out and got up to deal with the condom and clean-up, shoved Jared over to make room when he came back, and Jared cuddled up to him once he’d slipped under the covers.

“So you found a job?” Jensen said after a minute or so of silence.

“Mhm.” Jared nodded into Jensen’s shoulder. He really should leave and sleep in his own bed; he was tiptoeing into boyfriend territory here. But somehow leaving seemed even harder now that his bed was just a couple of feet away than when it had been ten minutes by car. “Starting tomorrow afternoon. Should be easy peasy,” he said and closed his eyes for a bit.

When he woke up, he was still in Jensen’s bed, Jensen was gone, and the cat was on the pillow next to him, chasing the dust particles floating in the streams of sunlight.

***

“Jared, I need a cheeseburger, extra cheese, no onions, no tomato, fries and slaw.”

“Jared, nuggets and onion rings.”

“Turkey club, mayo on the side.”

“Western omelet.”

“That’s a breakfast item. Tell ‘em we don’t have that right now.” Jared unsuccessfully tried to wipe the sweat from his brow with his sleeve.

“Jared, where’s my Cesar salad for table three?” Katie leaned against the counter, snapping her gum. “You told me ‘soon’ the last three times I asked.”

“They want the omelet anyway. _Please_? There’s a big tip in it, I know it.”

“Yeah, all right.” Jared finally got a damn burger plated and slapped the little bell on the counter. “Cheeseburger, no cheese, no onions, extra tomato, fries and slaw!” he yelled. “Sorry, getting to your Cesar salad next.”

“I needed _extra_ cheese, _no_ tomato.”

“Fuck.” Jared whipped the plate away from under Sandy’s nose. “Are they allergic?”

“Not as far as I know, no.”

Jared hastily scraped off the tomato and smacked two slices of cheese onto the patty before giving the plate back.

He pointed a finger at Katie. “You. Cesar.”

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. There was supposed to be a ticketing system, as had been explained to him during his one training session, to make sure the food went out in the same order as it had come in. There was also supposed to be a second cook. But of course the ticketing system had crashed ten minutes before his shift, and Chad had slipped in his own driveway and badly twisted his ankle. There wasn’t even any ice to slip _on_ this time of year! So Jared tried his best to do basically everything behind the counter until Chad’s replacement could make it in.

If only the ticketing system... He wasn’t that good with fixing technology, but it couldn’t really get worse than it already was, so he concentrated on carefully reaching inside the ticket printer, finding the fault and—

“They changed their mind. No omelet, they want—“

The explosion made his ears ring.

***

Jensen laughed himself sick for five minutes straight. “You blew up their printer?!?” He opened the fridge.

“It wasn’t my fault.” Jared made a sour face. “One of the servers distracted me.”

Luckily, the printer had been due for a replacement anyway, and further damage had been limited to a few dents in the stainless steel counter the printer had been standing on, so the manager had not made Jared pay for it. She had, however, kept Jared’s apron and cap and told him that he would always be welcomed as a customer.

“Still,” Jensen said, and piled a few leftover boxes of Thai into his arms. He carried them out to the couch, neatly sidestepping Jared’s own course to the fridge.

If Jared hadn’t been slightly annoyed, he would have noticed the way they fit around each other in the kitchen – or anywhere else, really. While Jared chopped some veggies for a salad and opened his mouth to ask, Jensen plopped a peeled onion beside his cutting board; when Jared was finished and turned around, Jensen had the dishwasher open to put the board inside; as Jared went to the bathroom to thoroughly wash his hands, Jensen picked up the salad bowl and some cutlery, so they met at the couch together to sit down and turn on the TV.

There wasn’t even a fight over the remote. It was weirdly domestic.

***

“You think I should be a receptionist?” Jared asked the cat. It had its hind legs digging into Jared’s thighs and front paws on the desk, meowing loudly as Jared browsed the website with the job offerings again. “You sure?”

The cat meowed again.

“All right. Can’t hurt to try.” He clicked on the link for further information on where to send his CV.

***

He lasted four whole hours before a clone of himself (created for a desperately needed bathroom break while the phone kept ringing without pause) dissolved right in front of a client who happened to be coming around the corner and scared her so bad she screamed in terror and wouldn’t stop.

Jared was politely asked to leave and not come back.

***

At the coffee shop, in an attempt to speed up the brewing process and get through the line faster, Jared managed to make the coffee so scalding that several people burned themselves just holding the cups. Jared healed them immediately, but it still cost the store a lot of apologies, vouchers, and free pastries.

***

At the daycare center, he lasted three days. The kids loved him; he could shoot rainbows from his fingers, and transform the hard floor into a big, bouncy cushion, and make little puppets dance and enact the scenes during story time.

Then the light drizzle of the past few days stopped, and the sun came out full force, enough for a trip to the nearest big playground, and the little angels who’d been so captivated by his ability to make the dinosaur figures breathe real, cold smoke turned into free-range little _time bombs_ , ready to run into traffic or throw themselves headfirst off the monkey bars at any given second.

Some invisible reins keeping them in close range did a lot for Jared’s peace of mind.

For their parents’, not so much.

***

The animals at the shelter must smell the cat all over him, because the dogs growled at him, the cats hissed, and the little rodents pressed themselves into the farthest away corner of their cages and bit Jared’s fingers when he tried to get close.

Slowly, he began to think that the cat did not bring him as much luck as he’d thought.

***

“Maybe you should try a different approach,” Jensen said that evening, lying next to him, both their chests heaving as they came down.

“Hm?” Jared was still floating a bit from the aftershocks of an extraordinary orgasm.

“Find out what you want to be first, and then pursue it.”

“Well,” Jared said, laying a hint of sarcasm into his voice, “I’m obviously _not_ a cook, a receptionist, a barista, fit for guarding children, or even suitable to pick up dog crap.”

Jensen slapped his chest, then ended up with his hand over Jared’s heart, pressing down. “But you _are_ a wizard. Guild or not. Use that to figure everything else out.”

Jared cocked his head. Not a bad idea.

***

The cauldron barely fit on Jensen’s stovetop. Jared pushed and prodded until it was at least halfway positioned to his satisfaction and set about measuring his ingredients.

It had taken a far while to find the right spell in one of his books. He had brought eight large boxes over from his room at the guild house, and Jensen had complained about each one he’d had to carry inside.

“Can’t you just—charm them lighter?” he’d asked.

Jared had shaken his head. “Sorry, most magic books are spell-resistant. Or would you want a book about the ten most popular hexes of the Middle Ages be cursed?”

Jensen had admitted that he wouldn’t.

Jared had books in all imaginable forms and sizes. From books so small you could contain them in a fist to ones with pages so thin you might destroy them by breathing on them wrong to large grimoires whose bindings Jared had to swear to Jensen were _not_ made of human skin. Not that he could be sure.

 _3/4 oz of sage_ – Jared hummed as he put it in. Truth be told, he was a bit nervous. The last time he’d made a potion had been a disaster, after all. He wished the cat was here. Despite its horrible career advice, he’d grown quite close to it, and it helped him focus.

Maybe that was how having a familiar was like.

But the cat always seemed to sense when Jensen would be home from work soon and vanished shortly before.

 _3 cloves, crushed_.

“D’you want some help?”

Jared did a double-take at the sight of Jensen leaning in the kitchen doorway, arms comfortably crossed as he watched Jared work. Jensen had never expressed more than polite interest in Jared’s abilities, and he’d never offered to help. “Uh, sure,” he said, handing Jensen the mortar and pestle and adding three cloves from a small jar. “Crush these a bit and put them in.”

“Is this—” Jensen peered into the cauldron.

“Cranberry sauce,” Jared said and then, when Jensen still appeared skeptical, added, “I swear. We haven’t used blood magic in decades.”

Jensen ground the cloves into a coarse powder and tipped them into the cauldron. Under Jared’s guidance, he did the same with five fennel seeds and chopped the flower of a Venus flytrap. Jared added orris root and some dried fireflies.

They worked well together here, too, chopping and grinding and measuring side by side. Jared wondered why Jensen had never considered a magical career; he seemed to have a gift for it.

“So what are you making, anyway?” Jensen asked, watching Jared stir in the last ingredients. “I’m assuming it’s not dinner.”

“It’s to help me realize my true self,” Jared explained. “I drink this,” he eyed the foul-looking potion with disdain, but it couldn’t be helped, “and in twenty-four hours I should know what to do with my life, and I can get out of your hair soon.”

“Oh.” Just for a second, something strange flitted over Jensen’s face, regret maybe, before he schooled his face back into a neutral expression. “Is it done?”

“Almost,” Jared said. “Now I just need to say the incantation while stirring it clockwise three times.”

“Wasn’t it anti-clockwise?” Jensen said.

“No.” Jared had already closed the book, but he’d memorized the last steps. “It’s clockwise, I’m sure.”

***

That evening, he felt a bit subdued when he crawled into Jensen’s bed. He would miss this – not the sex, he assumed they would keep doing _that_ – but simply having Jensen around, to talk, to mock TV shows with, to complain, to share a tired look with over the first cup of coffee in the morning. But it wasn’t what they’d agreed on early on: no strings of a relationship, no moving in together, just fast friends who occasionally hooked up.

Jensen sensed his dejection and rolled them over, pressed him into the mattress for a long, deep kiss. “What do you want?” he asked quietly.

Jared tipped his hips up in answer, spread his legs.

Jensen was gentle with him, opened him up slowly and called him _sweetheart_ , rubbed a thumb over his nipple and made him shiver. By the time he pushed inside it didn’t hurt at all, just filled Jared up in all the right places, made him complete.

When it was over, he slipped almost immediately into sleep. There was a quiet, “Love you,” the sound of a cat’s deep contented purr, and his momma’s voice telling him to lock the patio door. He went completely under before he could figure out what was real and what wasn’t.

***

The morning brought a strange feeling of wrongness that Jared couldn’t shake even after scrubbing himself from head to toe in the shower. Jensen was already off to work, it promised to be another beautiful, warm day, he was meeting Genevieve for lunch later. However, halfway through his morning he realized what was missing: the cat, who had been an unerring presence on his pillow every morning he’d woken up alone had not come by. Maybe it had made its way permanently home. Or maybe it simply hadn’t found a way in today.

Well, at least he could go look for it outside for a bit, see if he could find it. He shoved his feet into a pair of running shoes and grabbed his keys.

“Hey,” he greeted one of their neighbors from upstairs, a bright-minded girl with a slowly growing belly named Felicia who was checking her mailbox.

“Hi, Jared!” she said, then suddenly looked at him as if she saw him for the first time. She cocked her head. “You’re very tall. And handsome.”

“Uh, thanks.” Jared looked around, keeping his eyes open for any streak of sandy fur. “Listen, have you seen a cat around? Sandy-white color, bit goofy-looking?”

“Sorry,” she said. “But I’ll tell you if I do. You know, Jake and I talked about how hot it’d be to have you over for a threesome some time.”

“W-what?”

She sighed. “Yeah. As if you could ever detach from Jensen for long enough. Anyway, I gotta go, kid’s wreaking havoc with my bladder again.”

Jared turned to leave with an awkward little wave and pretended he didn’t hear her call after him, “And Jared? Think about it, you’re always welcome in our bed!”

***

An inspection of the flower beds someone, likely the owner of the building, had planted beneath the windows of Jensen’s apartment, yielded no cat, but had a woman Jared vaguely recognized as one of the neighbors down the street sidle over and, out of the blue, confess her ongoing affair with the UPS delivery man.

Asking around the neighborhood if someone had seen or owned a cat that fit Jared’s description brought up another affair with the same UPS guy, one neighbor who would have serious problems with the IRS soon if he kept cheating on his taxes like that, one father of three who had stepped on the family hamster and buried it in the garden while telling his family it had run away, and one adorable six-year-old in pigtails who was home sick telling Jared in a conspiratorial tone that Santa wasn’t real.

He was beginning to suspect that something was seriously wrong. He tried calling Jensen again, but the call went straight to voicemail just like the last six times. Instead he called Genevieve to cancel their lunch and cut off her recount of her latest boyfriend’s fetishes to hurry back home and figure out how much he’d screwed up the potion.

***

The meowing registered first.

It woke Jared slowly from a mid-afternoon nap, and the first thing he saw when he opened his eyes was the cat back in its rightful place beside him on the pillow as it watched him sleep. He reached out a hand and let the cat lick his knuckles while the other fumbled for his phone and its display of the time. On the screen he saw fourty-six missed calls and a hundred and twenty-nine messages. Jared had finally turned it to mute after his older brother had called and started to confess to every shovel of sand he had ever made Jared eat as a child.

“Hey,” he whispered to the cat. “You’re back.” It looked a bit disheveled today, as if it had been in a fight, the light fur dirty in places. The most noticeable thing about it were still its eyes, alert and deeply green, just like—

Jared sat up so fast, all the blood rushing south made him feel dizzy. “Jensen?” he said cautiously.

The cat meowed and butted its head against his knee.

How could he have missed this? The instant connection he had felt towards it, how it was never there when Jensen was, the fact that apparently none of the neighbors had ever seen it before? Jared had heard of shapeshifting familiars, but they were rare these days.

“Jensen?” he said again, pushing the hair from his face. The cat cocked its head as if to say, _took you long enough_. “ _Wow_. I’m so sorry, you must think I’m so stup—”

“Jared?” Jared’s head whipped around. “Um, did you... name a _cat_ after me?”

In slow motion, Jared’s gaze went to the cat in his lap – yep, still there – then back to Jensen standing in the doorway – still there, as well.

“I—wha—this isn’t you?” Jared asked – which didn’t make much sense even to himself.

“Obviously not.” Jensen licked his lips. “Jared, I need to tell—”

“Why have none of the neighbors ever heard of it?”

“How should I know?” Jensen stepped closer, and now Jared could see the light sheen of sweat on his forehead, the tired circles under his eyes. “It seems to be your familiar, you know better where they come from than I do.”

“And how come it was never here when you were?” Jared argued, still not entirely convinced that this wasn’t Jensen’s doing somehow.

“What are you talking about? It scratched at your closed window while you were still asleep; I let it in a couple of times.”

“And the rent? How can you afford this by yourself if you’re not doing any magic?”

“An uncle of mine died and left me some money – I _do_ remember telling you that.” Jensen had reached the bed and collapsed on it so Jared was looking at his profile. His hands were trembling, and he knotted them in his lap. “Apart from helping you yesterday, I swear I have never even dabbled in magic.” He took a deep breath, but before he could go on further, the cat wriggled out of Jared’s lap and padded the few steps across the mattress to rub against Jensen’s side.

Jensen laughed softly and unclenched his fingers to pet it. “I knew something was up the minute I got up in the morning. You were still in bed, and I had this... compulsion to wake you and tell you everything, but I knew I couldn’t.”

“Why not?” Jared asked.

Jensen turned his head to look at him. “Because it changes things.”

“Well, what if I want them to change?”

“Jared—”

Jared cut him off with a quick kiss. “I love you.”

“What?”

“I love you,” Jared repeated. “And I hate our shitty arrangement, or living apart, or pretending I don’t want to be with you every part of the day. And if what you were going to say was along the same lines – and I really hope it was, because I would hate to put a spell on you to make you forget what I just said and save my dignity – then I think we might have a chance.”

Jensen smiled at him, and in that moment you could see the magic of the truth potion release its hold and settle, satisfied, inside him. “Dork. I love you, too.”

***

Later, they lay entwined on Jared’s bed with the cat at the foot of it, cleaning herself and watching them. Jensen had taken a closer look at it and declared her a girl, and Jared had blushed scarlet, mumbling, “So definitely not you.”

He’d have to come up with a name for her and go back to the guild. Now that he had a familiar, they’d have to take him back in. His room at the guild house was already taken by a new wizard, Colin, promising kid, but Jared didn’t want to move back anyway.

He was content right here in Jensen’s arms.

The End.


End file.
